You may have reacted to the news of the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting with anger, or sadness, or frustration, or some mixture thereof. Dilbert creator and freelance persuasion guru Scott Adams responded by asking himself “what’s in it for me?”
This was his answer, a Tweet encouraging eyewitnesses to the mass shooting to sell their stories through his app WhenHub.
If any eyewitnesses actually were to arrange interviews through the app, Adams would take a cut of 20% for hosting the calls. Classy, huh?
When the Daily Beast tried to contact Adams himself for an (unpaid) interview, he accused them on Twitter or stirring up “fake outrage trolls.” And in a Periscope stream today he played the victim, claiming he was being targeted for his support of Trump.
As the Daily Beast reports,
Adams claimed many of his critics on social media were just taking part in an organized campaign against him, saying that critics frequently calling him a “grifter” and a “ghoul” amounted to proof that his detractors were acting in concert.
Er, the fact that a lot of people are calling you a “grifter” could also stem, not from collusion, but from the fact that you are a grifter?
Adams, who describes himself as a WhenHub’s chief strategy officer, did concede that he was using the shooting to promote his app.
“For those of you who are saying, ‘Scott, you grifter, you’re using this to get attention for your app,’” Adams said. “Well, obviously, yes.”
Would he do it again? Maybe.
“I do plan to do the same thing again in the future,” he said on his Periscope livestream, “Now if it’s a mass shooting, I might think twice.”
And then he laughed.
What a dilhole.
H/T — Daily Beast. And all the people who sent me the Daily Beast article!
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*sigh* I feel dirty having loved Dilbert as a kid. I still have plush Dilbert, Dogbert and Catbert in my storage locker. He really did speak to a certain cynicism in the up-and-coming information technology age and as one of those awkward dorky tech-interested engineering types, it was like a contorted mirror held up to that world and gave it a sense of humour.
It was perfect for its time. Before the lionization of Silicon Valley and tech-bro culture became the “next big thing.”
Just by coincidence, I was watching one of my YouTube review shows with my mom and it mentioned that time that Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry hosted a guide to the then-brand new Windows 95. She was like “that existed?!” and I said “Yeah, we rented it. I vividly remember it starting off with a terrible Wizard of Oz joke.”
So I had to show it to her:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b71rpN1iJKA
The internet hadn’t forgotten either, and there were even a couple of articles giggling at its dated content, but you got the sense that back then, Microsoft were trying like hell to impress you. They even hired two of the Friends to embarrass themselves for the sake of their operating system. This was still a novelty and that hopeless fatalism of Silicon Valley dominance over our lives wasn’t quite a certainty yet.
What surprised both me and my mom was how they hadn’t included Internet Explorer in the pitch. Turns out it wasn’t part of the initial Windows 95 launch, but it was part of that Microsoft Plus they mentioned.
A little OT, but I needed something more lighthearted.
Dilbert was never laugh out loud funny, IMO, but it functioned moderately well as a kind of capitalism-approved form of curated workplace cynicism. You probably wouldn’t get away with repeatedly publicly declaring that your boss is an idiot and you hate the company – but you could have a Dilbert desk calendar, and share cartoons with co-workers when they applied particularly well to your current situation. You could share a chuckle before returning to your soul-destroying deathmarch project. It went well with your red Swingline stapler.
I’d say this was grim even by igno-right standards, but… it’s not.
The Overton Window is really a sliding glass door, opening to the right….
@Bina
Seconding Bizarro and The Far Side. I’d also rank Calvin and Hobbes and FoxTrot as better comic strips.
All the best comic strips had a surrealistic element to them.
Bloom County forever.
Adams is the specific kind of learned fool who conflates “truth” with “simplicity.” If something’s not simple enough to understand immediately for him, someone who is at our most charitable a total layman in almost every regard, then it must be wrong. This quickly led him to mistrusting experts and thinking that they’re stupid because they can’t explain complex topics simply (read, correctly/truthfully/accurately). Eventually he’s reached a point where Occam’s Razor is a way of life and the answer to everything is just the first thing that occurs to him, even if it means that there’s a conspiracy to call him “ghoulish” and a “grifter.”
The amazing thing about Adams as a learned fool (as opposed to, say, Nicholas Nassim Taleb) is that his right-wing powers of projection are so strong that he’ll accuse people trying to explain to him that things are more complicated than he realizes of being “confused,” because they’re… not smart enough… to see that complicated things… should be simple…?
Also, it doesn’t help that he’s a bitter little fuck (like our dear president) and seems to resent the existence of people more talented, accomplished, or fulfilled than him. Always a plus.
@dust bunny
I just asked Mr. Boyfriend about his long-ago experiences with LSD. He said that it didn’t increase his empathy, but that if he had been steered in that direction it could have happened. We also talked about his experience on the balcony of his student union. He looked down at the concrete below and saw that it was fluffy. Should he jump? he wondered. It would be fun. Luckily, his rational brain vetoed this very attractive possibility.
Personally, I’ve always been extremely self-protective and haven’t dabbled in psychedelics. But I’ve found that novels are a terrific way to develop empathy. They’re also therapeutic. You find out that you’re not alone in your weirdness. Maybe you aren’t even weird.
“If any eyewitnesses actually were to arrange interviews through the app, Adams would take a cut of 20% for hosting the calls. Classy, huh?”
Cheap Adams should be rich why go after such small action, Desperate is another word that comes to mind trying to piggyback on a tragedy is sad.
Yes I know Crisis is an other word for Opportunity but this opportunity helps nobody I’m sure the media can find eye witnesses to tell their story on camera without Adam’s help.
Trying to make money off a tragedy without helping in any way is Sad. I expected much better business ideas from the creator of the Dilbert cartoon it seems Adam’s can criticize quite well but when given the chance this idea at least is dumber than anything he mocked in Dilbert.
You can buy garlic ice cream and garlic bread in which the raising agent is gangrene gas at the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Just fun facts from seeing it there, I have nothing real to contribute to the conversation. Can’t imagine why anyone, even a white supremacist, would target it. It’s not like… full of vegans you could assume might be liberal or some shit like that article Alan posted the other day. Why there? Boggles the mind.
Savanah:
Crip Dyke:
If anyone is capable of being an utter shit more than 100% of the time, it’s Trump supporters.
@Citerior Motive:
Hmm. I was going to say that it’s hard to be a shit when you’re asleep. But it occurs to me that it’s possible to be an utter shit after you’re dead: think of the continuing toxic influence of various dead writers and politicians, for example. So, in theory, you could indeed achieve greater than 100% shittitude.
Speaking of which:
https://twitter.com/danderebaby/status/1154738996616060930
Big Titty Demon, was that salt-rising bread? I’ve heard about it for years but have never encountered it. It seems to be mostly a Back East thing.